Things to Think About When Taking Down Statues

In New Delhi’s Coronation Park, painful symbols of British imperial rule have been collected and contextualized in a way that has allowed their potency to dissolve.

Photograph by Stuart Freedman / In Pictures Ltd. / Corbis via Getty

Coronation Park lies to the north of old Delhi, in a jumbled
neighborhood of residences, highway overpasses, and small businesses.
Power lines and cell-phone towers rise on the horizon. Between 1877 and
1911, however, imperial Britain staged several Durbars, or royal
celebrations, on the park’s flat expanse. British and European diplomats
gathered in tented encampments; Indian rajahs and subjects came to bend
their knees to Westminster.

The most significant Durbar took place in 1911, when King George V
arrived to introduce himself as the Emperor of India and to lay the
foundation stone for a new capital, New Delhi, which would succeed
Calcutta as the Empire’s seat of government on the subcontinent. Edwin Lutyens, the British architect, embarked on the design of the city,
conceiving the grand mall that runs from India Gate past the red
sandstone secretariats known as North and South Block to Viceroy House,
now renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan—President’s House.

As in London and in many American cities, statues consecrated these
public spaces; they were totems of British power. India’s independence
movement was gathering momentum when New Delhi was being built. Lutyens designed a statue of George V to stand beside India Gate—at
almost fifty feet tall, it was so ridiculously high that it all but
announced that British power was overcompensating. Britain also put up
around the new capital statues of more obscure governors-general and
military men—memorials to functionaries whom, as it turned out, history
would little remember.

Britain withdrew from the subcontinent seventy years ago this month,
creating, amid the bloodshed of Partition, the independent states of
India and Pakistan. (They came into being at the famous stroke of
midnight, the moment when Britain withdrew its sovereignty.) The
imperial statues in New Delhi presented a dilemma; compared with the
challenges of poverty, industrialization, and the desire to consolidate
a constitutional democracy, they were a minor irritant, but a highly
visible one.

A democratic country’s arguments about public space, history, and art
are necessarily continuous. One difference between democracies and
dictatorships is that the constructing and revising of public spaces is
not a propaganda opportunity for the ruler but a realm of democratic
discourse, influenced by popular opinion and competitive electoral
politics. After the shock of Charlottesville, as many American cities, towns, and campuses have taken down statues of Confederate leaders and
generals, or debated whether to do so, New Delhi’s example is perhaps a
useful one. Until the very recent rise of Hindu chauvinism, which has
polarized the country, India was a confidently syncretic society, one
that fashioned its drive for independence and nationalism from a long
history of conquests and adaptations, and sought to unify a population
breathtakingly diverse in its religious faiths, regional cultures, and
languages.

The challenge in revising public spaces is to avoid closing off debate,
denying the past, and arguing that art—even banal stone statues—should
never offend. Speaking recently about the debate over Confederate
monuments, Lonnie G. Bunch III, who leads the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, told the Times, “I am loath to erase history.” He suggested that the statues that were
removed should be grouped together in new spaces and contextualized. As
it happens, that is what New Delhi did, in the nineteen-sixties. The
city turned Coronation Park, the land that once hosted the Durbars, into
a public facility managed today by the Delhi Development Corporation. The
park’s architects erected an obelisk commemorating the Durbars, and
collected the monstrous likeness of George V and other former British
overlords from around New Delhi and scattered them about the park.

On a hot recent morning, while on a visit to the city, I took a long
walk through Coronation Park. Half a century after its creation, its
upkeep is perhaps not the Development Corporation’s highest priority. I
tried to follow signs to an “Interpretation Centre,” which I hoped might
lay out the curators’ intentions, but all I could find were sparse
concrete rooms containing caged rabbits. There was a cricket game under
way next to one of the old British statues. The park managers had lately
installed a playground with slides; children screamed and ran about. On
my zigzagging walk, when I rounded a stone figure, I usually startled
teen-age couples smooching in its shade.

The faces of some of the former British leaders had eroded, or else been
chipped by errant cricket balls; they were missing parts of their noses
or cheeks. Each statue’s base contained a granite plaque intended to
present an engraved inscription, but there was nothing written on them.
The original vision for the park, followed by its long neglect, had
created an eerie, unintentional beauty; the place feels as mysterious as
Stonehenge. New Delhi had not erased its imperial origins; it had
collected painful symbols of it and then allowed their potency to
dissolve.

In the United States, the post-Charlottesville arguments about Confederate statues have constructively spread knowledge about how such
objects were erected as expressions of Jim Crow power. In recent weeks,
the removal of some statues has offered citizens a way to counter,
however symbolically, the overt racism of President Trump. And, by again
raising the question of why a statue of Robert E. Lee is more offensive than one of a slaveholding Founding Father like Thomas Jefferson, the
statue debates have again forced Americans to reckon with the
foundational role of slavery in the construction of the Republic.

Yet statues are not ideas or arguments; they are relics. They stand
still, while the struggle for rights and democratic pluralism is
dynamic. And that struggle can lurch backward suddenly. In India today,
the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its Hindu-nationalist ideology known
as Hindutva, is busy rewriting school textbooks, to falsely revise the
history of Muslim conquest of the subcontinent, and to reduce the
prominence in the story of Indian independence of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India’s
first Prime Minister and who, during his seventeen years in office,
built the modern state and its resilient democracy. Nehru was an avowed
atheist, who promoted science, industry, and secularism; he worked to
keep Hindu chauvinism on the sidelines, and the Hindutva movement’s
ideologues have not forgotten.

The Hindu right’s attack on such a foundational figure as Nehru signals
the reach of its ambition to remake Indian nationalism through a
majoritarian narrative. As Prem Shankar Jha, one of the old lions of
Indian journalism, wrote this month in The
Wire, Narendra Modi, the B.J.P. Prime Minister, “is
intent upon changing the very idea of nationhood upon which India’s
political identity has been based not just for the past seventy, but the
past two thousand years.” The country’s sharp turn reminds us that the
official revision of history in public spaces is at least as likely to
be an illiberal project as an inclusive or cathartic one.

At least one monument has come down this summer, but two streets in Brooklyn have proved difficult to rename.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.